"You're a mother, all right."
"Who's calling whom a mother? I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head."
"Richard, this is getting to be beneath even my dignity. Gretchen, you wash his back; that's safest. I'll referee."
It wound up with everyone washing whatever he/she could reach-even Bill-and was not efficient but fun, with lots of giggles. They were both of the extremely opposite sex and just being around them was fun.
By twenty-two we were settled down for the night, Gretchen at the end wall, Gwen beside her, then me, then Bill. At one-sixth gee a rock shelf is softer than a foam mattress in Iowa. I went to sleep quickly.
Sometime later-an hour? two hours?-I came awake because a warm body cuddled against me. I murmured, "Now, hon' Then I came a bit wider awake. "Gwen?"
"It's me, Mr. Richard. Would you really want to see my bottom turn all pink? And hear me cry?"
I whispered tensely, "Honey, get back over by the wall."
"Please."
"No, dear."
"Gretchen," Gwen said softly, "get back where you belong, dear... before you wake others. Here, I'll help you roll over me." And she did, and took the woman-child in her arms and talked to her. They stayed that way and (I think) went to sleep.
It took me quite a while to get back to sleep.
XII
"We are too proud to Fight."
WOODROW WILSON 1856-1924
Violence never settles anything."
GENGHISKHAN 1162-1227
'The mice voted to bell the cat."
AESOP c. 620-c. 560 B.C.
Kissing good-bye while wearing pressure suits is depress-ingly antiseptic. So I think and I am sure Gretchen thought so, too. But that is the way it worked out.
Last night Gwen had saved me from "a fate worse than death" and for that I was grateful. Well, moderately grateful. Certainly an old man tripped by a barely nubile female not yet into her teens (Gretchen would not be thirteen for another two months) is a ridiculous sight, an object of scorn to all right-thinking people. But, from the time the night before when Gretchen had made it plain to me that she did not consider me too old, I had been feeling younger and younger. By sundown I should be suffering the terminal stages of senile adolescence.
So let the record show that I am grateful. That's official.
Gwen was relieved, I felt sure, when at noon Gretchen waved us good-bye from the cab of her father's rolligon lorry, as we rolled south in Aunt Lilybet's rolligon bus, the Hear Me, Jesus.
The Hear Me was much larger than Jinx's lorry, and fancier, being painted in bright colors with Holy Land scenes and Bible quotations. It could carry eighteen passengers, plus cargo, driver, and shotgun-the last riding in a turret high above the driver. The bus's tires were enormous, twice as tall as I am; they shouldered up above the passenger space, as its floor rested on the axles, high as my head. There were ladders on each side to reach access doors between the front and rear tires.
Those big tires made it hard to see out to the sides. But Loonies aren't much interested in scenery, as most Lunar scenery is interesting only from orbit. From the Caucasus to the Haemus Mountains-our route-the floor of Mare Serenitatis has hidden charms. Thoroughly hidden. Most of it is flat as a pancake and as interesting as cold pancakes without butter or syrup.
Despite this I was glad that Aunt Lilybet had placed us in the first row on the right-Gwen at the window, me next, Bill on my left. It meant that we could see all that the driver saw out front and also we could see somewhat out to the right because we were forward of the front axle and thereby could see past the tire. We could not see too clearly to the right, as the plastic of the pressure window was old and crazed and yellowed. But forward Aunt Lilybet had her big driver's port raised and fastened back; the view was as clear as our helmets permitted-excellent for us; the equipment rented to us by Charlie Wang took the curse off raw sunlight without noticeably interfering with seeing, like good sun spectacles.
We didn't talk much because passengers' suit radios were all on a common frequency-a babel, so we kept ours turned down. Gwen and I could talk by touching helmets, but not easily. I amused myself by trying to keep track of where we were going. Neither magnetic compasses nor gyro compasses are useful on Luna. Magnetism (usually none) means an ore body rather than a direction, and Luna's spin, while it exists (one revolution per month!), is too leisurely to affect a gyro compass. An inertial tracker will work but a good one is extremely expensive-although I can't see why; the art was perfected long ago for guided missiles.
From this face of Luna you always have Earth to steer by and half the time you have the Sun as well. The stars? Certainly, the stars are always there-no rain, no clouds, no smog. Oh, sure! Look, I have news for any groundhogs listening: You can see stars easier from Iowa than you can from Luna.
You'll be wearing a p-suit, right? Its helmet has a lens and a visor designed to protect your eyes-that amounts to built-in smog. If the Sun is up, forget about stars; your lens has darkened to protect your eyes. If the Sun is not in your sky, then Earth is somewhere between half and full and earthshine is dazzling-eight times as much reflecting surface with five times the albedo makes Earth at least forty times as bright as moonlight is to Earth.
Oh, the stars are there and sharp and bright; Luna is wonderful for astronomical telescopy. But to see stars with "bare" eyes (i.e., from inside your p-suit helmet), just find a meter or two of stove pipe- Wups! no stoves on Luna. So use a couple of meters of air duct. Look through it; it cuts out the dazzle; stars shine out "like a good deed in a naughty world."
In front of me Earth was a bit past half phase. On my left the rising Sun was a day and a half high, twenty degrees or less; it made bright the desert floor, with long shadows emphasizing anything other than perfect flatness, thereby making driving easy for Aunt Lilybet. According to a map at the airiock in Lucky Dragon Pressure we had started out from north latitude thirty-two degrees and twenty-seven minutes by longitude six degrees fifty-six east, and were headed for fourteen degrees eleven minutes east by seventeen degrees thirty-two minutes north, a spot near Menelaus. That gave us a course generally south-about twenty-five degrees east of south, as close as I could read that map-and a destination some 550 kilometers away. No wonder our ETA read three o'clock tomorrow mom-ing!
There was no road. Aunt Lilybet did not seem to have a tracker, or anything in the way of navigating instruments but an odometer and a speedometer. She seemed to be piloting the way river pilots of old were reputed to find their way, just by knowing the route. Perhaps so-but during the first hour I noticed something: There were range targets for the whole route. As we reached one, there would be another, out at the horizon.
I had not noticed any such guides yesterday and I don't think there were any; I think Gretchen really did pilot Mark Twain style. In fact I think Aunt Lilybet did also-I noticed that she often did not come close to a range marker as she passed it. Those blazes had probably been set up for occasional drivers or for relief drivers for the Hear Me.
I started trying to spot each one, making a game of it: If I missed one, it scored against me. Two misses in sequence counted as one "death" by "lost on the Moon"-something that happened too often in the early days... and still happens today. Luna is a big place, bigger than Africa, almost as big as Asia- and every square meter of it is deadly if you make just one little mistake.
Definition of a Loonie: a human being, any color, size, or sex, who never makes a mistake where it counts.
By our first rest stop I had "died" twice through missing ranging marks.
At five minutes past fifteen Aunt Lilybet let her bus roll to a stop, then switched on a transparency that read: REST STOP- TWENTY MINUTES-and under it: Late Penalty-One Crown per Minute.
We all got out. Bill grabbed Aunt Lilybet's arm and put his helmet against hers. She started to shake him off, then listened. I didn't try to check on him; twenty minutes isn't long for a rest stop when it involves coping with a p-suit. Of course this is even harder for females than for males, and more time consuming. We had a woman passenger with three children... and the right arm of her suit ended just below the elbow in a hook. How did she cope? I resolved to outwait her, so that the fine for being late would be assessed against me, rather than her.